What’s the difference between a goal and a challenge? Honestly, I don’t know, and I don’t know if it matters.

Call it a goal or a challenge, the point is, it gives me a kick in the pants to write more, make more stuff, etc.

The perennial goal/challenge is TO BLOG EVERYDAY. I always say I will, and I never meet the challenge.

Yes, it helps me “fail to success,” but for 2025, I really want to hit that success. It would be cool. A weirdly neat accomplishment.

(And maybe I miss a day or whatever because a kid broke his arm and we ended up in the ER for twelve hours or something. But even if I miss a day, I can’t miss more than two in a row, per James Clear’s advice in Atomic Habits.)

The reality is that I need a set time in which to do this blogging. Can’t be ad hoc. My mornings are for writer’s notebook and usually fiction writing. This is the quiet time in which I am alone enough to actually get things done.

The seemingly obvious answer is to do it at night. Blog about what I worked on during the day, blog about something cool that happened or something I read. Blog about “input.”

The seemingly obvious object is that I’m dead tired at night. Also, it’s the one time my husband and I are alone and can hang out.

Maybe there’s another option?

Finding that “habit time” is the secret sauce, at least for me. Whenever I’ve moved away from designating certain times for certain habits, it hasn’t worked.

The great part about early morning writing is that it’s the one thing I can (mostly) control. Unless a child wakes up sick or I have a weird doctor’s appointment at 7:00 a.m., I can control my wake up time and my quiet, alone-time in those pre-dawn hours.

The trouble is that I can’t add daily blogging to those early-morning hours because I don’t get up THAT early. I have enough time to wake up, stretch, make school lunches, write morning pages, and then work on my fiction for, say, thirty minutes or so.

Adding blogging to that mix seems like the proverbial straw on the camel.

In the spirit of “experimentation,” I’m going to try the night thing and see how it goes. To make sure I don’t get lost down in blogging-land, I’ll set a timer and try to write in the time allotted. Fifteen minutes. Then it’s back to the living room and hanging with the hubs.

That means my blog posts might tend to be on the shorter side. Maybe that’s okay. I can write some thoughts about a topic and then return to it the next day. Serialization!

Maybe I’ll blog more fiction too. Maybe.

I don’t want the daily blogging to be tedious, boring stuff, though. That’ll be a challenge. Gonna try to “show my work.” Share my influences. Share process and quotes and ideas I’m working through (that might end up turning into Substacks). Share my solo-RPG attempts. My input.

I’m not even sure why I want to challenge myself to blog everyday, except it would feel good to do something that forced me to get a little uncomfortable, to be a little more disciplined. I need a challenge because I need to grow. It’s as simple as that.